


Fade

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Introspection, Regeneration, the end of time part 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-26 01:03:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A ficlet, set at the end of The End of Time Part 2.  "There are some things he wants to forget."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fade

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a poetry fic-prompt on Tumblr.

It’s a peculiar process, the brain completely self-rewiring its own branching synapses. It’s inevitable, under this kind of magnificent strain, that a few memories will vanish.  It’s little things, most often, useless snippets of time cataloged in the arbitrary and meticulous halls of his measureless mind.  Apple trees in blossom in Prague, the lonely sigh of wind at a long past daybreak, the faces of passers-by.  Idle time, Tuesdays, sun-drenched slopes of red grass remembered vividly for what seems to be no reason at all.  Memories that only seem like keepsakes, but are really just clutter.  Nothing he’ll even miss.

 But there are some things he  _wants_  to forget.  Like anyone would, maybe.  Memories that have earned the mental tint of age, like the pastel fade of an old photograph, and others still sharp enough to draw blood.

With regeneration inevitable, the itch and thrum of the bottled energy pressing at every pore like shaken champagne at a cork, the fear is generally the only constant.  Because he rarely forgets anything he’d like to: the color and heat of a planet’s silent annihilation, sour endings, failures, every moment where something ceased to be beautiful.  Every time he couldn’t find the words.  

But more often, it’s just a fade—a whitewash of things remembered.  When later revisited, they feel flattened down, lesser; a room viewed with a new lampshade, the corners emptied of shadow, everything cast in a new aspect. Familiar landscapes rendered foreign as those of outlying moons, mountains eroded to ant hills.  Not always wrong, but different.  Diminished. 

It’s the same as—worse than—losing them altogether.  Having those things stripped down to something that’s less.  The difference between a photograph, a painting and a sketch.  

This time, it’s a quiet fear burning at his center that he will lose something of the utmost value.  A sudden laugh or a smile, the warmth between clasped hands. Applegrass and ten-quid bets and paper crowns at Christmas dinner.  The memory of something hidden in quiet glances and beating hearts. The pitch and elevation and angle of light on an abandoned street where he’d briefly known elation.  Brilliant fireworks in a deep empty space that is otherwise opaque black.

So he waits. Waits in darkness in a way that feels possessive and predatory, watching through the snowfall, trainers squeaking through the frost underfoot.  He’d only wanted to see her, one last time.  To sharpen the image, to lessen that perhaps inevitable fade.  So he won’t forget when he’s off being someone else, out beyond the high stars and the bend of the galactic arms.

It’s so he won’t forget to remember her.   

As moments inevitably do, it comes and it’s fleeting, and he doesn’t  _mean_  to speak.  His eyes sting and the pressure is too much.  There’s her voice and her smile, her eyes on him for the last time, puncturing fresh wounds the way he almost wanted.  He’s come because it’s the last time these memories will feel this way, will ache so profoundly.  Then she’s gone and the Ood are singing their song that no one will hear, the song that doesn’t end—it only changes key.  The footprints he makes in the snow are staggered on the journey back to where it will end in a violent crescendo, where death or something like it will come in a halo of gold.  

And he shall sing yet.


End file.
